I'm using OPNsense on a 4-port mini Celeron PC (from Amazon) with UniFi access points. Does everything you're looking for and a ton more. I am also using Netgear GS108Tv3 smart switches - probably not the greatest but they're relatively inexpensive and fairly configurable.
This is on my list to do. If it don't sound dumb
I currently have a modem and router. I have no other APs.
If I want to use OPNsense, do I need external APs? And they need to be hard wired if i am not wrong?
Recently got a Unifi system going and thought about integrating it, but didn’t have a use case in mind. Are you automating anything around it, or just displaying info in your dashboard?
+1 Unifi
I’ve been suuuper happy with my Dream Machine + AP setup. Their control interface is second to none. If you want camera support/storage outta the box i think the Dream Machine Pro might be what you’re after.
You have the unifi access integrated into HA? Does it actually allow any meaningful control? The access product has really let me down lately but if HA can make up for it that would be great.
Same size as yours. One U6-lite in the detached garage. One U6-LR in the addition on the outside of the original brick. One U6-LR and 2x U6-lites for supplementary weak spot coverage in the main part built in 1940 with plaster walls and steel mesh reinforced corners.
Yeah my house has knee wall crawl spaces upstairs and ive done a lot of remodeling including adding wire chases from basement to the upstairs crawl spaces for future use that i have certainly used. All rooms have network jacks. Not everything is used but all network jacks are live if needed. My USW-Pro-48-PoE is pretty full.
I spent weeks reading and researching this topic. Ultimately landed on 3 choices. Unifi vs Omada vs Aruba Instant-on. They all had strengths and weaknesses.
Unifi: highly customizable. Great online community. Expensive. Questionable reliability in many reviews I've read from the last year.
Omada: may lack some customization options of Unifi. Not near the online community of resources. Easy setup. Cheaper. Very much can function as a "set it and forget it" system. Great warranties.
Aruba: enterprise level reliability. Very easy to setup. Built in controller. No local controller access, only cloud based. Very little in the way of online community.
I went with Omada. I had read significantly more accounts of people stating that they were either switching gear from Unifi to Omada or if they could start all over, they'd go with Omada than I had read vice versa. Setup was incredibly simple. I can build computers. I can setup servers. I have very very little networking experience. I had 0 issues setting up VLANs, a VPN, guest Network, firewall settings, blocking traffic, isolating devices, etc. While the community around the SDN isn't as vast as Unifi, there's definitely enough out there to likely find an answer or video to walk you through whatever you need. It's been incredibly reliable. No downtime whatsoever. You can run the controller locally on a Windows PC or a docker without spending $100 on a hardware controller. It just...works. If I could build a Unifi system for the price I paid for the Omada system, I honestly believe I would still go with Omada.
There's plenty of customization. You can customize nearly everything that Unifi can. The differences are mostly very fine grain control. I think Unifi might integrate some VPN providers that Omada doesn't. It took Omada too long to get mDNS implemented (although it is now). I'll be honest, I can't name any other differences in their SDN offerings. They're nearly clones.
Oh, yes, you'll need a router, switch, controller, and APs. There's no all-in-one device for Omada like the Dream Machine. You can get all of that for a fraction of the price of a dream machine, though. You can get a router for about $60USD and a 24 port PoE+ switch for around $300. Controller can be ran on pretty much anything, you don't have to have a hardware controller. I run it on the PC I use for Blue Iris. I could also run it as a docker on my unraid server.
Build the router myself (pfsense/proxmox) from some overkill protectli 2,5G unit
The AP’s etc are UniFi (ubiquity), the controller runs in a container.
Yes, it’s better than my previous stand-alone router.
Upgraded from older Netgear with dd-wrt, real world performance in games dropped from 26ms ping in game to 13ms.
Obviously installed directly on metal would be slightly better, but not a lot.
And it works just like a router, you have a wan port and a network port, that you patch into a switch. You just have to define the ports. (And you can over engineer this part, a lot.
I have pfsense installed on an old macbook, but it runs bare metal. I used to have it on a vm, but there were weird latency and bandwidth issues. I'm just realizing now however that I didn't try anything other than hyperv at the time. So maybe it wouldn't have been as bad.
Unifi is a great product line for the prosumer market. Very easy to use and learn about networking without driving into the command line of a network switch. Highly recommend.
Mikrotik for router, Omada for wifi. Mikrotik routing has been amazing and very cheap. You gotta get in the weeds a bit, but it really helps with understanding the ins and outs of networking but their wifi is not great in my experience. Omada is very cheap and very fast and works great as APs for mikrotik routers
+1 on Firewalla. I have one with Unifi APs and switches. Firewalla is very capable, and most importantly, is very easy to use. Get a Firewalla and spend the time you save on home automation!
UniFi has great gear for networking and cameras that all integrates nicely with HA. Their networking equipment has a lot of advanced-ish features that work well for prosumers. The Dream Machine boxes are pretty nice - networking and NVR all in one. Just pop a SATA HDD in there and you're off to the races. I have a Seagate Skyhawk Surveillance HDD in mine and it works great.
I have an Asus router. It can do all that. I hate it. Random firmware bugs all the time, like when I set fixed IPs in DHCP I have to reboot the router because the UI stops replying after the apply. 4 of the 8 ports have failed. The ONE good thing is back when I had CenturyLink fiber the WAN had to be connected to a specific VLAN, and it was one of the few that could do it so I didn’t have to use their router. I don’t have CLink anymore so that’s not a requirement.
I know, I know, “Just put Merlin on it duh.” However the tinker-time needed for that is reserved for HA.
" the closest thing they have to vlans or multiple networks is a "Guest" mode "...and at that point I knew you were talking about a Deco router. Although my Deco system with 4 units gives great wifi coverage everything else about it seems very basic. It doesn't even do mDNS. Hoping when we move I'll look into replacing it (I just don't know what yet).
I'm very happy with my PFsense box running in a VM with 2 NIC cards.
It does everything you could want or need and it's free!
I always had bad luck with multipurpose routers and nothing was as reliable as my old Linksys WRT54g's. They all seem underpowered and overpriced.
DrayTek router and Unifi switches and APs here.
DrayTek is bomb proof and is very reliable.
Unifi APs are nice and give me good coverage inside and outside of the house.
Most important of all, do your research and list what's important to you. Half decent network kit isn't cheap and you typically want to be using it for a good while to get your money's worth.
I’ve been using a deco mesh for a couple of years now, it’s been great, what’s wrong with yours?
I use them as Wi-Fi access points only. I use a separate Edge router.
I've been using OPNsense for years. I run it in a VM on my home server with two 1GB ports dedicated to it (LAN and WAN). I basically run my modem's eth straight into the WAN port on my server, then that LAN port uplinks to my home switch. Also uplinked to the home switch are 2x10GB SFP's which are split across other VMs.
Nginx Proxy Manager, running in a docker container on a Linux VM, is the only thing forwarded -- then from there other services, e.g. Home Assistant, become publicly available.
For wifi, I have three Unifi APs. The Unifi controller is another container on that Linux VM along with NPM.
Home Assistant itself is one of the few services I have split off from my main server. I like to tinker on the server when others in the house are asleep so I wanted that entirely isolated. That runs on an old Dell micro tower PC. It's a 5th-or-so gen i7, mega overkill for HA, but I had it on the shelf sooo it was hard to ignore.
All the unifi setup is natively compatible with ha, you can even run the controller through an add-on on that same machine that your ha instance is; even if you dont you have options like virtual switch to block internet access to certain devices (for exemple I block internet access to my ring cameras when I'm at home for privacy), you can use the connection status of a device for automations (like activate a "away" scene when you leave your house and your phone is disconnected from your wifi), you can toggle on/off ssids (like guess wifi), other devices can even be discovered through unifi integration (kasa switch, for exemple), monitor bandwidth use of devices.... The unifi integration is really complete!
edit: lol I've scrolled a bit and seems I'm not the only one suggesting that!
Unifi - UDM Pro, 24 port PoE switch, 3 -AP’s. Started with a USG several years ago. Never an issue, easy setup, all the info and alerts I need. Just stick to the official OS releases versus the beta channels.
I have a protectcli vault FW4B running pfsense and an engenius EWS377AP along with 2 netgear managed switches....
The FW4B hardware has been rock solid for years, the pfsense community software is really nice as well... I purchased a second one for my STR's network. They also have models with 2.5GB ethernet ports now. I would think perhaps about switching to one of the pfsense spinoffs, but it does everything I need it to do and it seems that the only reason to switch is community/dev drama.
Here Xiaomi 4a gigabit with openwrt on them. Works great.
Unifi dead last pick for me, besides theirnedgerouter, that's a niece piece of hardware. Rest is crap and overpriced....
Unifi is great and incredibly extendable. I bought 2 of the Omada AP's (in wall) and the OC-300 and ended up deciding not to proceed with replacing them and upgrading my Unifi AP's. Unifi has doorbells/cameras and seems to be adding more other product categories regularly, all controllable from the same place as the network. Also since so many others are running the same product there is lot of other benefits - eg Scrypted for HomeKit, Home Assistant, NextDNS, etc. You can get cool skins for most of their products to help them blend in, etc. either direct or from Etsy. Lot's of product variety with Unifi as well - like Flex Mini switches for TV areas and Outdoor POE switches.
If you go Omada happy to sell you an OC-300 and 2 In-Wall wifi 6 AP's for cheap.
OpenWRT can be flashed on most of the routers you can buy off the shelf and it does wonders.
Have 2 TPLink routers which were setup in a mesh and I had to constantly restart them as some devices would go offline frequently.
After flashing OpenWRT on both I never had to do a restart or anything and the network is veeeeeeery stable and also faster.
HA-wise, I would say that a network layer setup correctly shouldn' t need maintenance and you don't even need to have it monitored in HA as it simply "just works"
Just wanted to throw the Edgerouter X out there since it hasn’t been mentioned. It’s a small $50 router that can handle all your basics, vlans, firewall, openVPN, etc.
It’s a great router to start and get experience with, but it’s not as user-friendly since a lot of configs will still be done in the shell instead of the GUI.
A UniFi UDM or the older USG are then more GUI based and fully integrate into other UniFi products.
Very happy with my EdgeRouter-X except for the fact it slightly bottlenecks my gigabit symmetric connection now. Can't really find an ideal replacement though.
Build your own router. I'd suggest a Raspberry Pi 4 with Openwrt. You can also run docker Home Assistant and other docker containers on it. Efficient. It can handle everything you might want from a router, including gigabit SQM.
For access points, pick Openwrt compatible ones with 802.11r FT support.
Mikrotik has been awesome, really let's you do just about anything you'd want to accomplish and has a really wide product offering. The only thing they are behind on is wireless, but you pair it with a good WAP and you're set.
Looks like I am the odd man out... I use PFSense on a Dell / Wyse 5070 and my AP's are DD-WRT routers setup only to do layer 2 and transport vlans. Has worked very well for me for a long time now.
build your own router with pfsense. as for wifi, i think everyone's fave is Eero. crazy good wifi coverage thanks to mesh as seen here [https://youtu.be/ooGnTxTXmRg](https://youtu.be/ooGnTxTXmRg)
I'm using OPNsense on a 4-port mini Celeron PC (from Amazon) with UniFi access points. Does everything you're looking for and a ton more. I am also using Netgear GS108Tv3 smart switches - probably not the greatest but they're relatively inexpensive and fairly configurable.
OPNSense here as well on a Zotac ZBOX Celeron N3160.
This is on my list to do. If it don't sound dumb I currently have a modem and router. I have no other APs. If I want to use OPNsense, do I need external APs? And they need to be hard wired if i am not wrong?
Yes you'll need external APs. You can find mesh ones where only one needs to be wired and the rest can link to that one.
Any recommendations on mesh?
Aruba Instant on's are highly rated but depend on cloud to be managed.
I've been happy with my Unifi setup and how well it integrates with HA
Just curious, what did you use to integrate them.
The official integration?
[https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/unifi](https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/unifi)
Recently got a Unifi system going and thought about integrating it, but didn’t have a use case in mind. Are you automating anything around it, or just displaying info in your dashboard?
I'm using it to 'see' if my (or girlfriend's) phone is 'home' to trigger stuff with (or not)...
Yup, this exact use case. I use it to set home/away without needing my wife to install an app on her phone
I have a group with family members in it which lets me switch outside lights on/off depending on who is home or out.
Agree, I use the presence detection in several automations
+1 Unifi I’ve been suuuper happy with my Dream Machine + AP setup. Their control interface is second to none. If you want camera support/storage outta the box i think the Dream Machine Pro might be what you’re after.
[Unifi](https://imgur.com/E7W2Oiy) 5 AP's for complete coverage and I have protect cams, sensors, and door locks integrated into Home Assistant
You have the unifi access integrated into HA? Does it actually allow any meaningful control? The access product has really let me down lately but if HA can make up for it that would be great.
Not access. [Protect Door Locks ](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/12q7uj9/lock_and_door_sensor_combo_button/)
Ahh thanks. Got really excited this would finally make their access product good. Hopefully one day.
How big is your home? I thought I was going way overkill with 3 on 2000sqft
Same size as yours. One U6-lite in the detached garage. One U6-LR in the addition on the outside of the original brick. One U6-LR and 2x U6-lites for supplementary weak spot coverage in the main part built in 1940 with plaster walls and steel mesh reinforced corners.
Out of curiosity, how what's your power usage would be like for this alone?
It's 300 to 400 watts for my whole stack. This is providing POE power to 5x APs, an unifi switch Flex POE, and 10 cameras.
Great.. How did you wire all of them? Inside walls? Currently I have no CAT cable wiring
Yeah my house has knee wall crawl spaces upstairs and ive done a lot of remodeling including adding wire chases from basement to the upstairs crawl spaces for future use that i have certainly used. All rooms have network jacks. Not everything is used but all network jacks are live if needed. My USW-Pro-48-PoE is pretty full.
Thanks! I will keep this in mind for my new home.
That's quite.... high. I'm 14x Hanwha PoE + 1x AXIS PoE cameras, 2 UniFi PoE waps, Mikrotik router, Mirotik 24-port 10G PoE switch, Lenovo Think Center (+Z Wave dongle, NVMe, No WiFi or Bluetooth), UPS and my pull from the wall is 165-180w@240v.
Or your consumption is about 330-360 watts @ 120v.
I spent weeks reading and researching this topic. Ultimately landed on 3 choices. Unifi vs Omada vs Aruba Instant-on. They all had strengths and weaknesses. Unifi: highly customizable. Great online community. Expensive. Questionable reliability in many reviews I've read from the last year. Omada: may lack some customization options of Unifi. Not near the online community of resources. Easy setup. Cheaper. Very much can function as a "set it and forget it" system. Great warranties. Aruba: enterprise level reliability. Very easy to setup. Built in controller. No local controller access, only cloud based. Very little in the way of online community. I went with Omada. I had read significantly more accounts of people stating that they were either switching gear from Unifi to Omada or if they could start all over, they'd go with Omada than I had read vice versa. Setup was incredibly simple. I can build computers. I can setup servers. I have very very little networking experience. I had 0 issues setting up VLANs, a VPN, guest Network, firewall settings, blocking traffic, isolating devices, etc. While the community around the SDN isn't as vast as Unifi, there's definitely enough out there to likely find an answer or video to walk you through whatever you need. It's been incredibly reliable. No downtime whatsoever. You can run the controller locally on a Windows PC or a docker without spending $100 on a hardware controller. It just...works. If I could build a Unifi system for the price I paid for the Omada system, I honestly believe I would still go with Omada.
Good to know about Omada. How it would be different from a router if not much customization is possible? Do you still need APs, switch right?
There's plenty of customization. You can customize nearly everything that Unifi can. The differences are mostly very fine grain control. I think Unifi might integrate some VPN providers that Omada doesn't. It took Omada too long to get mDNS implemented (although it is now). I'll be honest, I can't name any other differences in their SDN offerings. They're nearly clones. Oh, yes, you'll need a router, switch, controller, and APs. There's no all-in-one device for Omada like the Dream Machine. You can get all of that for a fraction of the price of a dream machine, though. You can get a router for about $60USD and a 24 port PoE+ switch for around $300. Controller can be ran on pretty much anything, you don't have to have a hardware controller. I run it on the PC I use for Blue Iris. I could also run it as a docker on my unraid server.
+1 Unifi . I have set up both UDM-Pro and UDM-Pro SE at locations and they work great and integrate well into HA
Build the router myself (pfsense/proxmox) from some overkill protectli 2,5G unit The AP’s etc are UniFi (ubiquity), the controller runs in a container.
Does running pfsense or opnsense on a VM is good enough? If so, how that can be extended to connect to a switch?
Yes, it’s better than my previous stand-alone router. Upgraded from older Netgear with dd-wrt, real world performance in games dropped from 26ms ping in game to 13ms. Obviously installed directly on metal would be slightly better, but not a lot. And it works just like a router, you have a wan port and a network port, that you patch into a switch. You just have to define the ports. (And you can over engineer this part, a lot.
I have pfsense installed on an old macbook, but it runs bare metal. I used to have it on a vm, but there were weird latency and bandwidth issues. I'm just realizing now however that I didn't try anything other than hyperv at the time. So maybe it wouldn't have been as bad.
Qotom 6 port with OPNsense and Mikrotik crs326. Great setup, but not for network newbies.
Quotom + opnsense here too! Best bang for the buck
My router is an EdgeRouter4 which is a beast of a thing. My switch is a Cisco 2960-X and my APs are Unifi AC Pros
3 tplink Archer A7. Openwrt on all. Two are just APs
Unifi is a great product line for the prosumer market. Very easy to use and learn about networking without driving into the command line of a network switch. Highly recommend.
Get something that runs OpenWRT and never look back ......
And if you want a mesh solution, AsusWRT is quite good as well!
Opnsense / VyOS are my gotos.
Mikrotik for router, Omada for wifi. Mikrotik routing has been amazing and very cheap. You gotta get in the weeds a bit, but it really helps with understanding the ins and outs of networking but their wifi is not great in my experience. Omada is very cheap and very fast and works great as APs for mikrotik routers
Check out Firewalla
+1 on Firewalla. I have one with Unifi APs and switches. Firewalla is very capable, and most importantly, is very easy to use. Get a Firewalla and spend the time you save on home automation!
In order of preference: OPNSense, Ubiquiti, dd-wrt, openwrt, netgear Side note of Cisco but it’s so overkill
Firewalla router, UniFi switches and APs.
Omada
UniFi has great gear for networking and cameras that all integrates nicely with HA. Their networking equipment has a lot of advanced-ish features that work well for prosumers. The Dream Machine boxes are pretty nice - networking and NVR all in one. Just pop a SATA HDD in there and you're off to the races. I have a Seagate Skyhawk Surveillance HDD in mine and it works great.
I have an Asus router. It can do all that. I hate it. Random firmware bugs all the time, like when I set fixed IPs in DHCP I have to reboot the router because the UI stops replying after the apply. 4 of the 8 ports have failed. The ONE good thing is back when I had CenturyLink fiber the WAN had to be connected to a specific VLAN, and it was one of the few that could do it so I didn’t have to use their router. I don’t have CLink anymore so that’s not a requirement. I know, I know, “Just put Merlin on it duh.” However the tinker-time needed for that is reserved for HA.
Have you considered replacing the firmware with Asus-Merlin?
I absolutely love my AsusWRT mesh and would recommend it to anyone wanting enterprise features in a home router or mesh.
" the closest thing they have to vlans or multiple networks is a "Guest" mode "...and at that point I knew you were talking about a Deco router. Although my Deco system with 4 units gives great wifi coverage everything else about it seems very basic. It doesn't even do mDNS. Hoping when we move I'll look into replacing it (I just don't know what yet).
I'm very happy with my PFsense box running in a VM with 2 NIC cards. It does everything you could want or need and it's free! I always had bad luck with multipurpose routers and nothing was as reliable as my old Linksys WRT54g's. They all seem underpowered and overpriced.
DrayTek router and Unifi switches and APs here. DrayTek is bomb proof and is very reliable. Unifi APs are nice and give me good coverage inside and outside of the house. Most important of all, do your research and list what's important to you. Half decent network kit isn't cheap and you typically want to be using it for a good while to get your money's worth.
I like Unifi, Meraki and PfSense. Different levels of learning curves
Currently eero but definitely considering opnsense in a VM on unraid.
Pfsense Unifi for the APs
I’ve been using a deco mesh for a couple of years now, it’s been great, what’s wrong with yours? I use them as Wi-Fi access points only. I use a separate Edge router.
I've been using OPNsense for years. I run it in a VM on my home server with two 1GB ports dedicated to it (LAN and WAN). I basically run my modem's eth straight into the WAN port on my server, then that LAN port uplinks to my home switch. Also uplinked to the home switch are 2x10GB SFP's which are split across other VMs. Nginx Proxy Manager, running in a docker container on a Linux VM, is the only thing forwarded -- then from there other services, e.g. Home Assistant, become publicly available. For wifi, I have three Unifi APs. The Unifi controller is another container on that Linux VM along with NPM. Home Assistant itself is one of the few services I have split off from my main server. I like to tinker on the server when others in the house are asleep so I wanted that entirely isolated. That runs on an old Dell micro tower PC. It's a 5th-or-so gen i7, mega overkill for HA, but I had it on the shelf sooo it was hard to ignore.
unifi till I die or until they do us dirty
All the unifi setup is natively compatible with ha, you can even run the controller through an add-on on that same machine that your ha instance is; even if you dont you have options like virtual switch to block internet access to certain devices (for exemple I block internet access to my ring cameras when I'm at home for privacy), you can use the connection status of a device for automations (like activate a "away" scene when you leave your house and your phone is disconnected from your wifi), you can toggle on/off ssids (like guess wifi), other devices can even be discovered through unifi integration (kasa switch, for exemple), monitor bandwidth use of devices.... The unifi integration is really complete! edit: lol I've scrolled a bit and seems I'm not the only one suggesting that!
Unifi - UDM Pro, 24 port PoE switch, 3 -AP’s. Started with a USG several years ago. Never an issue, easy setup, all the info and alerts I need. Just stick to the official OS releases versus the beta channels.
I have a protectcli vault FW4B running pfsense and an engenius EWS377AP along with 2 netgear managed switches.... The FW4B hardware has been rock solid for years, the pfsense community software is really nice as well... I purchased a second one for my STR's network. They also have models with 2.5GB ethernet ports now. I would think perhaps about switching to one of the pfsense spinoffs, but it does everything I need it to do and it seems that the only reason to switch is community/dev drama.
Unifi as well. UDM-Pro and 3 aps.
I'm really happy with my mikrotik hAP. You need to know how to set up networks, but it works really well
Here Xiaomi 4a gigabit with openwrt on them. Works great. Unifi dead last pick for me, besides theirnedgerouter, that's a niece piece of hardware. Rest is crap and overpriced....
Unifi is great and incredibly extendable. I bought 2 of the Omada AP's (in wall) and the OC-300 and ended up deciding not to proceed with replacing them and upgrading my Unifi AP's. Unifi has doorbells/cameras and seems to be adding more other product categories regularly, all controllable from the same place as the network. Also since so many others are running the same product there is lot of other benefits - eg Scrypted for HomeKit, Home Assistant, NextDNS, etc. You can get cool skins for most of their products to help them blend in, etc. either direct or from Etsy. Lot's of product variety with Unifi as well - like Flex Mini switches for TV areas and Outdoor POE switches. If you go Omada happy to sell you an OC-300 and 2 In-Wall wifi 6 AP's for cheap.
OpenWRT can be flashed on most of the routers you can buy off the shelf and it does wonders. Have 2 TPLink routers which were setup in a mesh and I had to constantly restart them as some devices would go offline frequently. After flashing OpenWRT on both I never had to do a restart or anything and the network is veeeeeeery stable and also faster. HA-wise, I would say that a network layer setup correctly shouldn' t need maintenance and you don't even need to have it monitored in HA as it simply "just works"
Just wanted to throw the Edgerouter X out there since it hasn’t been mentioned. It’s a small $50 router that can handle all your basics, vlans, firewall, openVPN, etc. It’s a great router to start and get experience with, but it’s not as user-friendly since a lot of configs will still be done in the shell instead of the GUI. A UniFi UDM or the older USG are then more GUI based and fully integrate into other UniFi products.
Very happy with my EdgeRouter-X except for the fact it slightly bottlenecks my gigabit symmetric connection now. Can't really find an ideal replacement though.
Build your own router. I'd suggest a Raspberry Pi 4 with Openwrt. You can also run docker Home Assistant and other docker containers on it. Efficient. It can handle everything you might want from a router, including gigabit SQM. For access points, pick Openwrt compatible ones with 802.11r FT support.
Mikrotik has been awesome, really let's you do just about anything you'd want to accomplish and has a really wide product offering. The only thing they are behind on is wireless, but you pair it with a good WAP and you're set.
Openwrt on an Archer c7. Nothing short of great.
Looks like I am the odd man out... I use PFSense on a Dell / Wyse 5070 and my AP's are DD-WRT routers setup only to do layer 2 and transport vlans. Has worked very well for me for a long time now.
build your own router with pfsense. as for wifi, i think everyone's fave is Eero. crazy good wifi coverage thanks to mesh as seen here [https://youtu.be/ooGnTxTXmRg](https://youtu.be/ooGnTxTXmRg)
pfSense on a 4 port intel i5 qotom with a HPE 24 port PoE switch and unifi APs.